Perceptions od Social Capitral and the Built Environment and Mental Health  

Oleh:

Araya, Ricardo ; Dunstan, Frank ; Playle, Rebecca ; Thomas, Hollie ; Palmer, Stephen ; Lewis, Glyn

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Social Science & Medicine (www.elsevier.com/locate/sosscimed) vol. 62 no. 12 (Jun. 2006), page 3072-3083.
Topik: social capital; social capital; mental health; contextual effects; wales

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: SS53.4 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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There has been much speculation about a possible association between the social and built environment and health, but the empirical evidence is still elusive. The social and built environments are best seen as contextual concepts but they are usually estimated as an aggregation of individual compositional measures, such as perceptions on trust or the desirability to live in an area. If these aggregated compositional measures were valud measures, one would except that they would evindence correlations at higher levels of data collection (e.g. neighbourhood). The aims of this paper are : 1. to investigate the factor structure of a self adminstered questionnaire measuring individual perceptions of trust, sociap participation, social cohesion, social control and the built environment 2. to investigate variation in these factors at higher than the individual level (households and postcodes) in order to assess if these cinstructs reflect some contextual effect, and 3. to study the association between mental health as measured by the general health questionnaire 12 (GHQ- 12) and these derived factors. A cross sectional household survey was undertaken during may - august 2001 in a district of south wales with a population of 140,000. We found that factor analysis grouped our questions in factors similar to the theoretical ones we had previously envisaged. We also found that approximately one third of the variance for neighbourhood quality and 10% for social control was explained at psotcode (neighbourhood) level after adjusting for individual variables, thus suggesting that some of our compositional measures capture contextual characteristics of the built and social environment. After adjusting for individual variables, trust and social cohesion, two key social capital components were the only factors to show statistically significant associations with GHQ-12 scores, however these factors also showed little variation at postcode levels, suggesting a stronger individual determiantion. We conclude that our results provide some evidence in support of an association between mental health (GHQ-12 scores) and perceptions of social capital but less support for the contextual nature of social capital.

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